


kuebiko

by typervoxilations



Series: seventy years of sleep [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Study, M/M, how do you even tag this, meta-ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-04
Updated: 2016-10-04
Packaged: 2018-08-19 12:45:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8208493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/typervoxilations/pseuds/typervoxilations
Summary: He spent years accommodating to a heavier left side and now he has to learn to live without - but that seems to be about the only burden he’s able to let go of. He can still feel the measured weight of his shoulder joint and socket, the way the density of the half-replaced rib cage and parts of his spine make him hunch forward as if he’s still carrying the weight of the world even though there is nothing anchored to them now.
Or, into the mind of Bucky Barnes.





	

_**kuebiko** [久延毘古] (lit. "long stretch help old")_

  1. _a state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence, which force you to revise your image of what can happen in this world._



 

* * *

 

 

His first memory is that he’s drugged up to the _gills_ and everything is acid-green and strange and he can’t get up - is he tied down or are his limbs just that heavy? He hopes they’ve forgotten him. He hopes they _haven’t_ because being left to starve isn’t how he wants to go, either. It’s been a long while since anyone’s checked up on him, but he’s also pretty sure his ability to judge time is FUBAR. The air is swimming as if he’s watching the lights flicker on the ceiling as if he’s underwater, sounds muted. Someone is shouting, a lot of someone’s are shouting, but it’s all coming from too far away. His left eye socket and cheekbone are _throbbing_ with pain, and he can’t _breathe_.

He thinks Steve might be an illusion.

“I thought you were dead.”

Steve is probably an illusion.

“I thought you were _smaller_.”

Steve says something back-

What did he say?

 

( Skin peeled away and there’s no blood but it’s _bright red underneath_ and he might throw up but that could be the drugs and dirty blonde hair tucked under the _stupidest_ helmet he’s ever seen and blue eyes and _god, he better not have one of those_ and then- Static. It’s not hot, but he can’t stop sweating. )

 

His first memory is that he can’t _bear_ to wear the uniform properly because they’re in the middle of war, who cares about regulation?

But really he’s just trying not to think about how it feels too tight around his throat, and the bruises have long since healed but he can’t bring his fingers anywhere higher than the third button down from the top - fourth button, sometimes, when he feels as if his chest can’t contain his heaving breaths - and forgoes the tie completely.

Can’t stop the way he feels metal clamped down over the upper left half of his head, his wrists, his _neck_ -

 

( He breaches the surface of white, gasps for breath, tries to reach for the flicker of- Static again. Again? )

 

His first memory is that it is so cold. He can’t feel his left arm, it’s _numb_ and- 

_The procedure is already started. You are to be the new fist of Hydra._

That’s not quite right because he knows he is moving his fingers, but his entire left side is heavy and unwieldy and bright under sharp lights. He tries to breathe and his ribs are so tight around his lungs that he thinks they might burst.

He thinks he might have screamed.

 

( Static. Again. But that’s not right. Is it? Everything is cold. )

 

He wants-

 

( _Ж_ _елание_. )

 

His arm aches, an old phantom pain, but it doesn’t matter, he is a weapon.

 

( _Ржавые_. )

 

He wasn’t born. He was _made_. A tool.

 

( _Семнадцать_. )

 

He loses track of time.

 

( _Рассвет_. )

 

It means nothing when he is put under just to be dragged back out from the cold. _Put him on ice_.

 

( _Печь_. )

 

Nameless. A ghost.

 

( _Девять_. )

 

He never remembers his assignments, isn’t supposed to, and it’s easy to remain detached, but he remembers this one. He speaks up once, _I knew him_ , and knows it is a mistake, shoulders drawing up, arms tucking close. A tool has no voice, has no purpose but to be used. He’s not supposed to ask questions. _But I knew him_.

 

( _Добросердечный_. )

 

The man on the bridge. Who was he?

 

( _Возвращение на родину._ )

 

_Wipe him, and then start over._

 

( _Один_. )

 

The man on the bridge makes him think of things he didn’t realize he had known, hadn’t realized were buried in inaccessible parts of his mind. _The procedure is already started._ Sharp winds that were colder than cryo whistling in his ears. _You are to be the new fist of Hydra._ The gut-wrenching sensation of plummeting.

 

( _Грузовой вагон_. )

 

_Bucky?_

 

( _Cолдат?_ )

 

_Who the hell is Bucky?_

 

( _Я готов отвечать_. )

 

His mask falls with a clang in the fight with the man on the bridge and something is knocked loose in his chest, in his head. _BuckyBuckyBucky_ \- where has he heard that before? _Sergeant Barnes_ , a voice in his head purrs.

He thinks he can hear someone screaming.

 

( He is _Bucky_. )

 

He rolls the words over in his head, reading about himself off a _plaque_ and-

 

( _He_ is Bucky. )

 

It fits strangely in his mind, this persona of who he was. The man in the video standing next to his (former) Mission grins. He can’t remember the last time his own face made such an expression. The mask hadn’t only bound him in silence, but then he had always been a tool - gun, knife, garotte; whatever the occasion called for - and weapons don’t need emotions. But the mask had been yanked off and somehow he had never put it back on. He can’t reconcile himself to the grinning man, not yet, but he’s starting to realize the enormity of the nothingness before cryo-sleep and he’s not sure how to feel about it yet. Not sure how to _feel_ at all.

But maybe if he closes his eyes and repeats the words enough he’ll start to feel that they’re true.

 

( He _is_ Bucky. )

 

It comes back to him in jealously guarded flashes, while he is on the run - but less _running_ as there is just _hiding_ , to be perfectly honest, because where in the world could he run to where the past will not catch up to him? Better he hunkers down with his back to a sturdy wall and a roof over his head and tries not to let the weight of it all crush him to pieces.

 

( Bright lights along the streets at night, rowdy hollering down below, but they don’t mind, they make do, the three of them - him, Steve, Beckie, because she was his favorite of all his siblings - and it’s a tight fit in the dumbbell tenement they’re forced to share for space and rent reasons, but they make it work.

Doesn’t remember the names of his other baby siblings until much, much later, but right then what’s _important_ is Steve’s flaxen hair and too thin limbs and the way the worn comforter of his small bed swallowed him up so completely that he had to restrain himself from reaching for him and making sure he was still there. )

 

It’s a double-edged sword.

Because remembering the _good_ means remembering the _bad_.

 

( Memories of Steve are blurred at the edges by time, splintered by cryo, buffed by warm fondness and laughter and _I’m with you ‘til the end of the line, pal_ , but the memories of blood and death are not. He curls up and tries to sleep but jerks awake with every last gasp of breath, every neat bullet through the skull, every slide of knife into skin. )

 

He keeps a backpack of essentials under the floorboards and stays up finding ways to not get caught unaware instead, runs and runs and runs until he’s caught and thrown back into a blur of not being in control of his own head again.

 

( He doesn’t want to fight anymore. Please, please _, please_ , he’s so tired of fighting, of killing, of hunting and being hunted and _forgetting_ and remembering, of being shoved out of his own mind and dragged back in, screaming and kicking, and there’s so much blood on his hands, he doesn’t want this, any of this, god he’s so damn _tired_. )

 

He’s almost a hundred years old and so is Steve, but Steve spent the past seventy years in an unbroken sleep and doesn’t have the jagged slivers of the years punctuated with kills and flashes of empathy wiped clean by a machine refined from that very first time in an Austrian Hydra weapons facility in Kreischberg, backdrop of acid-green eating away at his brain.

 

( He remembers dragging Steve out of the water and not quite being sure _why,_ and running before he could think to question it, but even after everything, Steve drags him out of the water and _stays_. Why does Steve stay? He’s done nothing to deserve this unwavering loyalty except for the fact that he had _been_ something, someone to this man, and was it really all it took? )

( Of course it was. It was  _Steve_. )

 

Steve chooses him over Tony, (ex) Winter Soldier over the Avengers and-

His shoulder is jerking spastically and he can’t quite get his balance because he’s leaning too much to the right to make up for the mass of an arm that’s _no longer there_ , so he’s too busy catching his breath through the iron curved around his lungs that he can’t find enough of it to ask _why_.

 

( For the first time since they saw each other on the bridge, Steve chooses to let the shield go and something comes loose in his chest, in his head. He closes his eyes and thinks _Steve_ , because it _is_ Steve, not Captain America, not anymore.

He thinks _Steve_ and he thinks he might have said it out loud. )

 

“It’s better for everyone.” He says. _Don’t do anything stupid until I get back,_ is what he means, and Steve doesn’t answer, and on one hand he wishes Steve _would (How can I? You’re taking all the stupid with you)_ but it’s okay that he doesn’t because he knows Steve knows, and when he wakes up, they’ll have all the time in the world to relearn everything that they’ve missed.

 _I’m with you ‘til the end of the line_ , and they both know Steve's not going to go anywhere.

 

( He spent years accommodating to a heavier left side and now he has to learn to live without - but that seems to be about the only burden he’s able to let go of. He can still feel the measured weight of his shoulder joint and socket, the way the density of the half-replaced rib cage and parts of his spine make him hunch forward as if he’s still carrying the weight of the world even though there is nothing anchored to them now.

He’s not James Buchanan Barnes anymore, and he’s not the Winter Soldier either, but he doesn’t have the first clue to how he could ever go back to being “Bucky” again. But no one else remembers Steve Rogers, and Steve isn’t Captain America anymore, but he hasn’t been “Stevie” in a long time either, and maybe it doesn’t matter.

They’re neither of them alone anymore and the world has always moved on without them, so he sinks into his final cryo-sleep and thinks, _let it_. )

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so this was incredibly difficult to write for because Bucky would not behave at all and putting oneself into his mind is exhausting. I still love him though. Bucky’s not really fighting with anyone but himself. 
> 
> Желание - Longing  
> Ржавые - Rusted  
> Семнадцать - Seventeen  
> Рассвет - Daybreak  
> Печь - Furnace  
> Девять - Nine  
> Добросердечный - Benign  
> Возвращение на родину - Homecoming  
> Один - One  
> Грузовой вагон - Freight car  
> Cолдат? - Soldier?  
> Я готов отвечать. - Ready to comply.
> 
> The Russian bits in this are, I think, the actual trigger words used in Civil War, so far as I can tell. That little bit with the them was me trying to write stuff that probably could’ve been tied into the words? Seventeen was a bit of a stretch though, because I read somewhere that Bucky was born in 1917 so…. maaaybe?


End file.
